The users, such as patients, inside or outside of a hospital often require safety measures to avoid getting hurt by their voluntary or involuntary actions, such as but not limited to, body movement during seizures. For example, a patient resting in a hospital bed may inadvertently come in physical contact with a bed rail during a seizure and may get hurt. Rails of the hospital bed are usually made up of hard plastic or metal, which may hurt the patient during an epileptic episode or similar occurrences. The bed rails also house necessary buttons or functions that may be operated by staff and patients for changing height, and position etc. of the bed. The unfortunate aspect of these bed rails is innate design framework; hard plastics or metal that may increase the risk of injury to a patient.
Existing products for providing safety to patients, and users are usually expensive, non-standardized, and/or inefficient. For example, current practice for treating an individual on “seizure precautions” remains non-standardized, and is usually accomplished by taping linen, for example, blankets, cotton, bath towels, etc., to each of the patient's side rails or using other inefficient methods of securing linens to the rails i.e. elastic, knot tying, and so forth. Although, there are various products available in the market designed specifically to pad furniture rails, but these products are usually large, bulky, inconvenient, and bed/brand/furniture specific. Further, the high cost of current standardized items decrease the widespread implementation as they may create a financial burden on facilities or private individuals. Due to high cost of the standardized products or pads, they are usually not available for all individuals (or patients) in need, leading to the use of unstandardized, unsafe, unhygienic, and unverified makeshift padding methods mentioned above. Further, for private facilities such as, but not limiting to, hospitals, nursing homes, research labs, or pharmacies these makeshift items do not meet the safety, quality, or standards these facilities set out to accomplish. Furthermore, use of non-standardized products creates an unsightly and unprofessional atmosphere. Therefore, these products are rarely stocked by hospitals, and when ordered, are difficult to store on units for patient use. Due to these products' inefficiency and lack of availability, the users, like nurses, in turn rely on former and most commonly used solution of attaching the linens to patient care furniture such as bedrails, chairs, and the like.
Some examples of non-standardized accessories include—Tape, linen, gowns, clothing, garments, and other items mounted to furniture railings that are not sufficient and do not provide the prerequisite safety for individuals requiring padded furniture. Linen and tape are huge reservoirs of bacteria and often times are left on the furniture railings for hours and sometimes days at a time until becoming visibly soiled. This reservoir can house highly resistant and/or dangerous microbes like Clostridium difficile (or C. difficile) or Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) infections, hence increasing the chances for a hospital acquired infection. This practice may further endanger patients at risk for skin breakdown, aspiration, or other emergency situations. In addition, due to common positioning of the protective linen on various hospital bed rails, the exterior buttons such as bed controls, get fully or partially covered and become inaccessible to the nurses and other users, hence making it difficult to use. The inability to adjust bed positioning can lead to decreased compliance and consistency when frequent patient repositioning is vital to protecting patients from hospital acquired pressure related injuries. More acutely, the inaccessibility of bed controls may cause a delay in care in emergency situations, i.e. aspiration, shortness or breath, or “Code Blue” scenarios.
In light of above, there exists need for apparatuses and techniques that can be used with the furniture for providing safety against injuries to the users.